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Author Topic: add superoverlay support for KML output?  (Read 7068 times)

andyroo

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add superoverlay support for KML output?
« on: May 04, 2012, 10:24:34 AM »
Would it be possible to add superoverlay support for the KML generation? superoverlays offer the best performance of any imagery I've seen on Google Earth, taking advantage of the same tiling scheme that Google uses for the GE imagery. There are good examples here:

http://www.maptiler.org/

Google also mentions that they can be useful for generating models only on demand, and I wonder if this region-based and distance-based tiling of surface and imagery resolution could be incorporated into the output from PhotoScan Pro, either for orthophotos or textured models or both. I especially would use it for orthophotos.

a few years ago I was working on high-resolution (1m) shaded relief and backscatter imagery from multibeam sonar over a large area, and I wanted to make it available in Google Earth. Until I discovered superoverlays, all of the test imagery I generated was either too big to display or too coarse to appreciate the detail, but I was able to generate superoverlays that showed everything in 256x256 pixel tiles, optimized by a cool png-optimization technique, and stored as nested networklinks that put a minimal load on our server.

If this could be done within PhotoScan Pro, it would make it easy for your customers to generate large datasets they could serve or provide to clients that would be plug&play in Google Earth. The tiling schemes you have already allow for tiles to be created, and it seems like it wouldn't take much to add the kml to implement it.